I[sabella] Frith, Life of Giordano Bruno the Nolan (1887)

The sentence which Joyce is purported to have borrowed from this work for his pamphlet, “The Day of the Rabblement”, is underlined below. See account of Appendices - infra.

Note: See Richard Copley Christie, Selected Essays (Longmans 1902), pp.330-36 for a critique of Frith’s book on Bruno [see COPAC records - online]. Christie is not complimentary, finding her eulogy too enthusiastic:

‘That Mr. Frith is an admirer of the man, and a thorough- going partisan of the philosopher, is perhaps to be expected. But his tone of unmitigated eulogy is not that in which the biography of Bruno should be written, and in this respect Mr. Frith contrasts unfavourably with Bartholmess and Berti, to whom, and especially to the former, the student must still turn if he wishes to obtain a sober appreciation of Bruno’s character and philosophy, for neither sobriety of judgment nor sobriety of language are characteristics of our author.’ (p.334; available at Internet Archives - details & page.)

See also his essay ‘Was Giordano Bruno really burned?’ in the same collection (pp.161-71; orig. in Macmillan’s Mag., Oct. 1885, 435-40.) Christie - who is the author of numerous works of classical and Renaissance scholarship and criticism - believes emphatically that he was, contra. M. Desdouits, et al, who question the authenticity of Scioppius’s letter.

Contents
CHAPTER I	Birth at Nola, 1548 - The Spanish Viceroys - The Poet Tansillo - Dominicans - Aquinas - The Noah’s Ark - Pope Pius V	1
CHAPTER II:	Naples - The Florentine Academy - The Trials at Naples and in Rome - Flight from Rome, 1576 - Genoa - Noli - The Sphere - Bruno’s Theory of the Stars and Suns - Turin - Venice - Copernicus	28
CHAPTER III:	Geneva, May 20, 1579 - Lyons - Toulouse, 1579-80	50
CHAPTER IV:	Geneva - Journey through France, 1581 - Paris - Lully - Some Latin Works on the Art of Memory	68
CHAPTER V:	England, 1583-85 - M. Castelnau de Mauvissière - Doctrine of Ecstasy - Traces of German Mysticism - Bruno at Oxford, June 1583 - His Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul - The Printer Vautrollier - Sidney	104
CHAPTER VI:	Second Visit to Paris, 1585 - The Disputation - Portrait of Bruno - Value of Induction and of the Imagination - Influence of his Philosophy upon his Character - Its Influence on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz	136
CHAPTER VII:	Paris, June 1, 1586 - Mayence, July 1586 - Marburg, July 1586 - Matriculated at Wittenberg, August 20, 1586 - Quits Wittenberg, March 1588 - The Farewell Oration at Wittenberg	163
CHAPTER VIII:	Prague, 1588 - Helmstedt, January 13, 1589	189
CHAPTER IX:	Frankfort, July 2, 1590 - On the Threefold Minimum - On the Monad, the Innumerable, the Immense, and the Unfigurable - On the Composition of Images, Signs, and Ideas	205
CHAPTER X:	Zurich - Padua - The Trial at Venice	238
CHAPTER XI:	The Trial at Rome - The Death of Bruno	284
Available at Internet Archive - online.

It was necessary that the universal should in its various parts be unequal. Were they equal the beauty of the world would be impossible for its perfection is manifested only by the connection of the various parts to the whole. If, therefore, the world is a complete and organised whole, we cannot conceive more than one ruler, as it is inconceivable there can be more than one order (“We are all,” says the Apostle, “members of one body”). The world has many members and but one body. The chaos of Anaxagoras is number without order. (Intentio, VIII, ix)

The historians of the beloved city [Nola] count among famous Nolans the poet Tansillo, Albertino Gentile, the jurist; Algeri, who was the forerunner of Bruno in the grievous way of martyrdom; Ambrogio Leone, the historian of his native place and the friend of Erasmus, with a number of lesser lights, ranging from Merliano the sculptor, who was surnamed the Neapolitan Buonarotti, to Santarelli Stellioli, names which still live in the history of the little town.

Nola, according to Berti, preserved more and deeper traces of Greek civilisation than any city of the Magna Grexia. It was a bishopric, and twelve years after Bruno’s birth could boast a college founded by the Jesuits. [..; 6]

There seems also no reason to doubt that the poet Tansiloo was the friend of Bruno’s father; and in that case, the latter probbaly came of a stock by no means ignoble. Tansillo, himself of noble birth, belong to the republic of letters. He was befriended in his youth by Ariosto; he was acquainted with Tasso, and he was well received at the court of the Viceroy, Don Pedro de Toledo. (p.7.)

[Of the Francisans and the Dominicans:] Yet it may be said, in the words of Dante: “Unto one end their labours were” (Paradise, xi), a verse immediately following his celebrated comparison of St. Francis to the flame, and St. Dominic to the light: ‘the one seraphic in ardour, the other, by his wisdom on the earth,a splendour of cherubic light.’

But if their ends were the same, there was a vast difference in the means employed by the two orders. St. Dominic, that saturnine and repelling Spaniard, the “Chastiser” of Dante, was aptly characterised by his funereal garb; by the dog, his emblem; and by the title of Persecutor of the Heretics, bestowed on him by the Inquisition of Toulouse, after his expedition to stamp out the Albigensese. Twelve hears after the death of the founder, his powerful spirit was living still; and the brethern of his Order became the bodyguard of the Inquisition - the domini canes, the dogs of the Lord, who truly stood in no need of them. (p.10)

“From my eighteenth year,” he said in the evidence of his trial (Doc. xi), “I doubted within myself ... regarding the name of the persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit, not comprehending the two Persons distinct from the Father, except as speaking philosophically, an assigning the intellect of the Father and the Son and his love to the Holy Spirit, without recognising that name of Person, which St. Augustine is declared [sic] to be a name, not old, but new, and of his time.” [Note: Doc. is Documenti atorno G.B. ed. by Berti.]

Nor were his views of the monks such as make him tolerant of their company. In the Expulsion he speaks of them as “personages very ready to give away places in the kingdom of heaven, but incapable of earning an inch of ground for themselves,” “Let the friars live,” says on of the accusers at his trial, repeating the words of Bruno, “on a scanty portion of broth” (Doc. iv.), and ascentic contemplation or ecstasy he dismisses (Sigillum Sigillorum, Gfr., 576) with the strongest expression of disgust. (p.12.)

Indeed, to rebut the charges of pantheism and atheism levelled at his memory must be the task of every student of the Nolan philosophy [...] Had Bruno survived to write, like Descartes, a Discours sur la Methode, the Nolan must have escaped the accusation of pantheism which has arisen from his conception of a world-soul, with its attendant difficulties. “He suffered,” says Coleridge in his Table-Talk and Omniana, “at Rome for atheism; that is, as is proved by all his works, for a lofty and enlightened piety, which was, of course, unintelligible to bigots and dangerous to an apostate hierarchy. If the human mind be, as it assuredly is, the sublimest object which nature affords to our contemplation, his lines, which [17] portray the human mind under the action of its own elevated affections, have a fair claim to the praise sublimity.”’ (pp.17-18.)

He believed a great revolution was in store for the world, and he was never weary in repeating his conviction that the hewn branch should blossom, ancient truths revive, hidden truths be revealed, and that upon the darkness of night a new light should arise and shine upon men (W[agner], ii. 82; De Trip. Min., p.7). [19]

There is no real difference between the shadows of ideas. Beauty and ugliness are conceived by the same operation of the mind. There are many ideas but there is but one method of perceiving ideas: imperfection, evil and ugliness are not separate conceptions. Their peculiarity consists in their being a negation of reality, a nonentity in entity, a defect in effect. (Intentio, XXI.) [78-79]

“The Highest intelligence,” says Bruno, “is the Highest Light (Conceptus, IX) and he who desires to comprehend that which is absolute and steadfast must strive after the light, for every creature can receive it according to its own capacity.

Quotes Bruno: “He who desires to understand understands”; “He who desires to elicit the truth elicits the truth.”

Few persons perhaps suffered more from these [‘the unhallowed crew’ - as above] than Bruno. “One man,” he writes in his preface to Infinity, “as if I had an eye to himself, menaces me; another, for being only observed, assaults me; for coming near this man, he bites me; and for laying hold of that one he devours me. It is not one who treats me in this manner, nor are they few; the are many, and almost all.” It is true that Bruno makes no secret of his aversion to the mob, for which they repay him in kind. “I hate the vulgar rout,” he says in the same preface [ie., Infinity]. “I am displeased with the majority of humankind.” And in his dialogues on the Immense and the Innumerable he speaks of having been sped by the Beautiful and by Truth towards the goal where the shouts of the throng and the storms of the age can never more trouble him. [82]

The philosophy of Bruno was deeply imbued with German mysticism. A direct influence on his mind was exercised by Nicholas, Cardinal-Archbishop of Cura. All the doubt and difficult arising from our failure to apprehend the nature of God was to be vanquished, according to Cusa (De Conjecturis), by ecstasy, which has power to overcome the world and all things hemming in the soul. Professor Carrière traces the relation of this mystic ecstasy to the Indian Bhagavad-Ghita, in which man is enjoined to withdraw himself, to lose his soul in Brahma, and to find Brahma in his soul.

“To understand,” says Bruno, “is to see forms and figures in the imagination, and intelligence is imagination, or not devoid of imagination.” (Gfr. 529.) These words are important if we would master the peculiar [116] views of the philospher. His mission was not that of exact inquiry; he did not desire to establish facts by slow intellectual process: he soul to enter into the very nature and quintessence of things by means of that intellectual intuition which was called by his master, Nicholas of Cusa, an organ of the highest knowledge. [Ftn.: Schelling held Bruno in high esteem as the “forefather of the philosophy of identity.” (Schelling’s Bruno, 1802, pp.310, 328-352.)

Eckhardt, however, with sound sense, remarks that mere contemplation is selfishness, and that if a man were in an ecstasy like St. Paul, and knew of one needing a little pottage, he should quit his ecstasy and minister to the needy; for works do not cease when santification is attained, but rather multiply. (p.115.)

“In the things of Nature, Cause and Principle are divided; but in God, Cause and Principle are one. Thus the reason rises to God by means of Nature.” (W, i, 234-39.)

“There is nothing in Nature without Providence and without final Cause.” (W. i. 190.)

Somewhat later in the book (393) Bruno again alludes to this sonnet. “As happens to one flying in the air, the higher he rises above the earth the more he has of air beneath sustaining Him; and, in consequuence, he is the less exposed to the plagues of gravitation: thus he can fly the higher because he cannot return to the under world without painfully dividing the air, although he may consider it were easier to divide the depths of air about our earth than the heights of air about the other stars. Thus with proficiency in this progress comes greater and [131] greater facility in mounting aloft. For every part of bodies and of the said elements, when approaching their natural home, move with the greater impetus and potency; thus whether a man will or no, he must needs arrive there. And as we may divine bodies from parts of bodies, so we may judge of things intellectual by their objects, as their places, countries, and aims.”

Some verses on the same page faintly recall the lines, “Doubt that the stars are fire.” The “felicitous phrase” of Sir Philip Sidney, “that sweet enemy France,” which delighted Charles Lamb, was perhaps borrowed from Bruno. He speaks of “my sweet enemy” in Sonnet 49, and the expression occurs again in Sonnet 52. As the book was dedicated to Sidney, the words may very well have found their way into his sonnets. Bruno uses them when speaking of heroic love, with “its sweet anger, the efficacious assaults of that gracious enemy, too long a stranger and pilgrim.” “0 worthy love of the beautiful! desire for the divine! “ he cries, “lend me thy wings; bring me to the dayspring, to the clearness of the young morning; and the outrage of the rabble, the storms of Time, the slings and arrows of Fortune, shall fall upon this tender body and shall weld it to steel.” (131-32.)

[Quotes Bruno to the Rector of Paris prior to the ‘literary tournament’ of 1586:] “If I were able to persuade myself that you would always receive the Peripatetic doctrine for truth, I should [139] without any doubt abstain from discussing them, for your university owes less to Aristotle than Aristotle owes to your university. [...] But I firmly believe that in your prudence and magnanimity you will receive my proffer of service with kindness.” (pp.139-40.)

“He seems,” says Professor Carrière, “to have reached his conclusion by means of intuition and induction, for his mathematics are insignificant; and when approaching figures and geometrical formulae, he is so little able to bridle his imagination that he continually falls into a mystic symbolism.” (p.146.)

Such was the labour of the great Italian. Passing by the ways of Induction and Imagination, he came to Immanence, and to that reconciliation of Immanence and Transcendence which is his most signal service to philosophy.

“For though,” Enfield writes in his History of Philosophy, “he acknowledges only one substance in Nature, yet it appears from many passages in his writings to have been his opinion that all things have from eternity flowed from one immense and infinite fountain, an emanative principle essential to the Divine nature. From this source he derives his minima, or atoms, of which the visible world is formed. To these [148] he ascribes perception, life, and motion. Besides these, he supposes a distinct principle of combination and union, or a soul of the world, derived from the same fountain, by which the forms of Nature are produced and preserved. This intermediate agent, which connects all the other emanations from the eternal fountain, is, in the system of Bruno, Nature, by means of which, out of infinite emanations from the eternal fountain, infinite and eternal worlds are produced; whilst in truth only one being exists which is infinite, immutable, indivisible, good - the uncreated light which pervades all space, and which has within itself one substantial form of all things.” [149]

Evidence as the criterion of truth, doubt as the initiation of truth - these were his legacy to Descartes. He bequeathed to Spinoza the idea of an immanent God and the distinction between active and passive Nature. To Leibnitz he gave the germ of the theory of monads and the theory of optimism. Moreover, with regard to the mathematical and physical sciences, the theories of the centre of gravity of the planets, the orbits of the comets, the imperfect sphericity of the earth, the first idea of the vortex are due to him; and the boldest thinkers of our time owe to him the principle of the absolute identity of the subjective and the objective, the ideal and the real, the thought and the thing. [156]

Spinoza, in common with Bacon, Leibnitz, and many other writers, was not accumstomed to name the philosophers from whom he derived assistance. [...; 159].

Spinoza may have shrunk from naming Bruno, the uncompromising enemy of all Aristotelians, by whom he had been hunted from town to town, everywhere roving and rejected, the author of the Expulsion, which was reputed to have denied God, and accused, moreover, of having written De Tribus Impostoribus. [159]

Spinoza, however, fell too soon under subjection to a law of mechanical necessity, resulting in what has been called “Spinozism” or atheism, [...] God in the language of Spinoza, loves no one (Ethics v. 18 coroll.); he is the possessor of perfection, in perfect and eternal rest. Busied and absorbed in his conception of God, he lost sight of a just conception of man. [...] But in comparing the teaching of Spinoza and Bruno, there is a marked distinction in favour of the Italian philosopher. His exalted view of Nature as a living mirror in which we behold the “picture of natural things and the shadow of Divinity”, is far removed from the realism of Spinoza; and in the crucial test of philosophy a great and striking divergence arises. With Spinoza the ideal and the real are one; with Bruno nothing is real but the ideal. For or the idea is the source of all things. Thought precedes Nature (ante naturalia); Nature is the shadow of ideas (forma sine vestigium idearum). When thought follows Nature (post naturalia) it is called understanding; and in the same proportion as the things of Nature are more perfect than the shadow of ideas, the original idea is more perfect than Nature.

According to Bruno, it is the soul which gives shape to the forms of the world; all movement being an expression of an inner life, a seeking for and fleeing from of kindred souls and souls opposed. [sic]. But the poetic aspect bestowed by him on the universe was completely removed from the theory of Descartes, which, in its separation of soul from matter, set up the dualism against which Bruno strove. [164]

“Coleridge,” says Lewes, “used to say that imagination was the greatest faculty of the philosopher;” and the German critic Hillebrand was told by Leibnitz himself “that all his discoveries had been the result of lightning-like intuition and divination,” ascertained afterwards [146] by observation and experiment.” Again, “Physical investigation, more than anything besides,” says Sir Benjamin Brodie, in hia address to the Royal Society (Nov. 30, 1859), “helps to teach us the actual value and right of the imagination” of that wondrous faculty which, left to ramble uncontrolled, leads us astray into a wilderness of perplexities and errors, a land of mists and shadows, but which, properly controlled by experience and reflection, becomes the noblest attribute of man, the source of poetic genius, the instrument of discovery in science, without the aid of which Newton would never have in vented fluxions nor Davy have composed the earths and alkalies, nor would Columbus have found another continent.” (pp.146-47.)

Every pin-prick angered him. Indications of his character abound in his works. He speaks (W[?agner] ii. 221) of “heroic generosity, which can pardon those beneath it, compassionate the weak and infirm, subdue insolence, trample upon temerity, rebuke presumption, and vanquish pride.” A true Neapolitan, he practised no reserve except in silence and other negative qualities. He scouted compromise, allotting a place in the skies to Anger, which he regarded as “a most necessary virtue” (W. ii. 219); “for it favours law, strengthens truth and judgment, and sharpens the wit, opening the road to [164] many notable virtues of which peaceable minds know nothing.” In another work he says (W. ii. 424), “No man truly loves goodness and truth who is not incensed with the multitude, as, in what is commonly called love, he would be jealous and fearful for the thing beloved.” It was his prayer to be all arms and all eyes, Briareas and a new Argus, that he might penetrate and I embrace the whole of the infinite universe together with “the matter of Nature,” which, “being always the same under all forms of Nature, is not to be seen by the eye, but with the reason alone, with the intellect.” He calls upon “heroic Fear” to make him as much afraid of perishing from among the illustrious as irom among the living. “O memory of a well-spent life!” he cries, “make old age and death carry me away before my mind comes to be disordered. And thou, Fear of losing the glory acquired in life, make old age and death not bitter, but desirable and dear” (W. ii. 96). In the same work (W. ii. 186) he writes: “ Fortitude is ordered to mark those things which the strong ought not to fear - hunger, nakedness, thirst, pain, poverty, solitude, persecution, death; but from those other things which ought to be dreaded, because they injure, men must flee with all diligence. These are ignorance, injustice, unfaithfulness, falsehood, avarice, and the like.” Again, he asks of the gods to make him “unmoved and intrepid when honour and the common welfare are at stake.” (pp. 164-65.)

Conclusion: The fame and honours which allure vulgar minds, to him were nothing. His life was a long protest. God is, God is truth ; and that truth shines forth in Nature, which is his handiwork. God is, and all is in God, but in a manner befitting his protection. [...] The things of Nature by which we are surrounded, are shadows, unreal and not abiding; but the spirit, the soul, the form, the act of the divine cognition, the substance which no human eye had ever seen, the Monad which can never be perceived by mortal sense, this alone is real, abiding, and true; this was before the worlds were; this is Infinity. To perceive it is the only true knowledge; to be joined with it is the only true happiness. The majesty and immutability of God dawn upon the eye of man, and, led by love, the great revealer, the eager human spirit is united with its Giver. If this assurance should penetrate the heart of one reader, the Nolan will not have died in vain, nor will the humble labours of his biographer be counted as nothing. (q.p.; quoted in R. C. Christie, op. cit., supra)

Contains a page-long note to Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante, facing the columnar details of its publication [p.320], cites an English translation as Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante, or The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Translated from the Italian of Giordano Bruno. London: Printed in the year 1713. - is said to be made by W. Morehead in the British Catalogue. The dedication to Sir Philip Sidney is omitted. There is a French translation as Le Ciel Réformé. Essai de traduction de partie du livre italien Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante. Demus alienis oblectationibus Veniam, dum nostris impetremus. - Plin. L’an 1000,700,50. This is by a ‘Monsieur ***’, who leaves the work unfinished. Frith writes: ‘In too sprightly humour he speaks of the martyrdom of Bruno, whom he calls “this good Jacobin”, as a “literary anecdote”, perhaps because he wished to make light of the event: although, to do him justice, he warmly denied the charge when a friend whom he met told him that Bruno’s book was a satire against the Court of Rome.’ She also cites a review of Bruno’s ethics by E. B. Hartnung, chiefly founded upon the Expulsion, [as] ‘Grundlinien einer Ethik bei Giordano Bruno (Leipsig 1878), and a ‘not unkindly notice’ by Enfield in his History of Philosophy, vol. II, p.474, which ‘humorously renders the title as “Dispatches from the Triumphant Beast”. (p.321.)

A second page of notes is inserted facing details of De Lampade Combinatoria (1588), explains that it is the Wittenberg edition of a work published by Bruno in Prague and carried to Wittenberg in unsold copies which were newly prefaced and bound by him, with a cancelled Prague t.p. The whole is dedicated to Rudolf II. (p.333.)